South-Central Texas. I'm not going to disclose exactly where I live. There's an odd tendency online for me to run into people I know in real life.
I live in the downtown area, which is pretty nice in that I work a twenty-five minutes' walk away and I can pretty much buy everything I need in the immediate area. However, the immediate periphery is just a tourist trap, the area shuts down when the local basketball team wins, and artificiality aside, there are a lot of homeless clusters. You see a lot of interesting things, sad things, and upsetting things. It could be an okay place if you are looking for inspiration to write, but I am trying to leave as soon as possible.
Pros:
Cheap. My first apartment had rent of only $480 a month. 650 sq. feet with some included amenities. This was actually in a decent area with professionals.
Plenty of opportunities to find work in social services and the non-profit industry. Granted, you don't get paid much, but you will find something if you are persistent.
Cons:
Widely varies by parts of the city. Class divisions are apparent and there's a lot of resentment if you even speak a certain way (such to indicate that you've at least attended college for a time, if not graduated). I am 23 years old. I am often asked why I am not married and/or do not have children. Is this normal where any of you live? Where I have lived, men are overly aggressive, do not respect personal boundaries, and things that happen on public transportation are unacceptable. Right now, I live with a lot of other people. This summer we had some graduate students from Boston stay. Their experiences on the bus match my experiences on the bus in this city, but apparently the conduct of the people on buses here would not be tolerated in Boston. Or so the graduate students told me. If you don't speak Spanish fluently, you are a racist. If you can't complete a conversation with customers in Spanish, it's unsurprising that you'll get written up for that. This hasn't happened to me, but I've observed it happen.
Public schools are of poor quality in some parts. There are areas where the public schools are so good that you might as well be in another state. There are some good private schools with decent tuition prices. Colleges, both public and private, are of poor quality. The area in general does not value education, and a lot of people who do grow up and go to school here eventually leave the city and do not come back. These people are often treated with distaste for "being ashamed" or "not giving back." Many in this city claim to be politically progressive but are unprincipled in that they refuse to help themselves even when subsidized (whether by government or nonprofits) services are offered to them and in some way or another they spit back into the faces of those who provided the service. I explain these observations, and others I won't bother to write about in detail here, to other people who live elsewhere. It's odd to them.